The complex intertwining of Judaism and Islam across the centuries made deep impressions in the literature and culture of both communities. We regularly encounter the expression “Judeo-Christian” to describe the shared roots and common “Abrahamic” lineage of both of those traditions; likewise, the historian Richard Bulliet suggests adopting a similar coinage to express the parallel development of European Christendom and Middle Eastern Islam in his influential book The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (Columbia University Press, 2004).
Similarly, the traces of Jewish scriptural tradition in Muslim literature, preserved in texts of history and historiography, hadith, exegesis, and other corpora, are conventionally (but problematically) termed isra’iliyyat, but they might better be termed Islamojudaica. The corresponding traces of Muslim tradition in Judaism, discernible in works of literature, philosophy, and midrash, might be termed Judeoislamica.
Scholars have long investigated the germinal impact of Judaism on the Qur’an and formative Islam. The language of “influence” has often been invoked in a problematic way to describe that impact, and is rightly rejected today due to its reductive implications; scholars of the past often asserted that Muhammad and the early Muslim community “borrowed” from the Jewish community as a way of denigrating Islam as inferior and derivative. That said, it is undeniable that formative Islam took shape in dialogue with—and in response to, and sometimes in conflict with—some variety of Judaism current in late antique Arabia. After the Arab conquest of massive amounts of territory in Africa, the Levant, Iran, and Central Asia, the Muslim elite ruled a vast multicultural empire from Spain to the frontiers of China, encompassing a variety of older communities; at this time, a majority of the world’s Jews came under Islamic rule, and Jewish culture flourished and took on its definitive shape in dialogue with the emergent culture of classical Islam.
As a scholar of both Bible and Qur’an, I am especially interested in the intertwining of exegetical traditions, through which we can see both the Muslim and the Jewish communities reinterpreting the legacy of Israel. The exegetical traditions of these communities were mutually permeable and reflected their complex interactions; these engagements are reflected in the early tafsir tradition and Islamic lore of the prophets (qisas al-anbiya’), the midrashic literature produced in the early Islamic period, and the classic biblical commentaries of early Middle Ages produced by Jews living in Muslim lands.
I am also particularly interested in how complex engagements, social circumstances, and political imperatives impacted the representation of Jews in Islamic tradition—even, surprisingly, when these ‘Jews’ were actually Muslims whose claims and beliefs were deemed heretical. (This is the subject of my article “Measure for Measure,” cited below; this dynamic also figures heavily in my comparative essay “ISIS, Eschatology, and Exegesis,” listed here). Such representation includes Muslim traditions on early figures who converted to Islam or were known as transmitters of Jewish lore to Muslim scholars, thus acting as a bridge between cultures (see my article “Isra’iliyyat, Myth, and Pseudepigraphy,” listed here).
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021): 256–302
“Measure for Measure: Prophetic History, Qur’anic Exegesis, and Anti-Sunnī Polemic in a Fāṭimid Propaganda Work (BL Or. 8419)”
Journal of Qur’anic Studies 16.1 (2014): 20–57
ENCYCLOPEDIA ARTICLES
Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009–)
“Isra’iliyyat” (13 [2016]: 521–529)
“Jew, Jews, VI. Islam” (14 [2017]: 181–187)
BOOK REVIEWS
“The Jews of Medina and the Challenge of Early Islamic Historiography”
Review of Haggai Mazuz, The Religious and Spiritual Life of the Jews of Medina Leiden: Brill, 2014
Review of Qur’anic Research 2.2 (2016)
Ze’ev Maghen, After Hardship Cometh Ease: The Jews as Backdrop for Muslim Moderation
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006
International Journal of Middle East Studies 40.4 (2008): 700–702
DOI: 10.1017/S0020743808081713
Carol Bakhos, Ishmael on the Border: Rabbinic Portrayals of the First Arab
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006
Association for Jewish Studies Review 32.2 (2008): 412–414
DOI: 10.1017/S0364009408001281
Robert Hoyland (ed.), Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society
Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004
Al-Masāq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 20.1 (2008): 120–122